Can Government Get Innovative?

Hackathons will help your company and agency not only improve the technical support for executive decision-making but also challenge the status-quo of what is possible at middle and tactical levels of management.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), is taking the lead on cutting red-tape and bridging the gap between the technology world and accelerating relationships, ideation and talent recruitment through hackathons. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), the $5 billion mapping agency led by Director Robert Cardillo and Deputy Director Susan Gordon have set in motion some of the most aggressive and openly strategic goals in the federal government.  Announcing a strategy that embraces new and diverse sources of information, techniques, and tools has set the agency in motion to develop a stronger relationship between the technical developer world and NGA's Enterprise Innovation Office.

Why were hackathons chosen as a point mechanism to achieve strategic goals?

1. Hackathons are open to everyone. Made up of dynamic groups of developers, coders, creatives, entrepreneurs, programmers and designers. Hackathons offer the opportunity for meeting the types of people government are desperate need for as well as offering the participants the opportunity to meet them, learn new skills in coding, presenting and team building. While government tends to operate in an insular fashion with few real options to choose from, hackathons crack that mold open.
2. Hackathons pull industry and government together. Hackers love playing with the new tools and capabilities and what better setting to see and hear from real users what the art of the possible really is.  Industry giants have grasped this concept and often sponsor events to engage with, recruit and scout new niche capabilities that keep them open to take advantage of an increasingly open and connected world. They want this type of talent to want to be part of their organization.
3. Hackathons solve problems. While there are different goals surrounding a hack, such as hypothesis testing, ideation, art-of-the-possible, direct impact application building and process improvement. The purpose is all about collaboration, with industry, individuals and government.
4. It's just beginning. The hacking community and competitors are growing which makes it more vital for industry and government to become educated and to shape the future for students and companies, cultivate skills that translate to years of careers benefiting all sectors.
5. Hackathons are the lowest cost mechanism to achieve strategic goals. And they happen to be an effective mechanism to achieving an non-insular operation for government and industry

For more information contact Brian Vinci, Blue Compass, LLC at [email protected] or 571-293-2253.

About  NGA: 

NGA, is the nation's primary source of geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT for the Department of Defense and the U.S. Intelligence Community. As a DOD combat support agency and a member of the IC, NGA provides GEOINT, in support of U.S. national security and defense, as well as disaster relief. GEOINT is the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information that describes, assesses and visually depicts physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth.

About Blue Compass:

Blue Compass is a Customer Experience and IT Strategy women-owned small business headquartered in Tysons Corner, VA. We blend strategy and analytics with customer insights, design and creative thinking to help federal government and commercial customers discover, implement, and improve their products and services.

About Descartes Labs:

Descartes Labs, founded in 2014 by researchers hailing from Los Alamos National Laboratory, released a 3.1-trillion pixel, cloud-free Landsat 8 composite image of the world along with two others based on the European Space Agency's Sentinel satellites on Feb. 6, 2017.

Descartes Labs uses cutting-edge science to advance global forecasting in areas such as crop production and food security. Their cloud-based computation platform is behind the company's large-scale analysis, machine learning, environmental change analysis, and global predictions which are used by the commercial, academic, and government sectors.

Descartes Labs is headquartered in Los Alamos, NM, and has additional offices in Santa Fe, San Francisco, and Washington DC, and New York City, where you'll find its supercomputing, machine learning, and image recognition experts working. They are supplying the data sets via the Descartes Labs platform for the Hackathon. For more information contact [email protected] .

SOURCE Blue Compass, LLC

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